The Effect of the Eight-Week FIFA 11+ Injury Prevention Program on Adolescent Footballers' Functional Movement Screen Scores

Sports carry the highest risks of injury and adolescents are more injury-prone than other age groups in this respect. The FIFA 11+ has been thus introduced as an injury prevention program and the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) can be used as a tool to predict injuries. Therefore, this study, with a quasi-experimental research design and experimental/control groups using pretest/posttest, aimed to assess the effect of the eight-week FIFA 11+ injury prevention program on adolescent footballers' FMS scores. For this purpose, 50 adolescent male football players were randomized into experimental or control groups. The experimental group accordingly received the FIFA 11+ training for eight weeks, three sessions per week and 20 min each session, but the control group only performed routine exercises. Before and after the injury prevention program, all the participants completed the FMS tests. The results revealed that the FMS score was lower than 14 for each group at the pretest stage, but this value significantly elevated to over 14 for both groups after implementing the eight weeks of traditional and FIFA 11+ programs (p<0.05). However, there was a significant growth in the scores of the group receiving FIFA 11+ as compared with the controls performing the traditional training (p<0.05). These results demonstrated that both traditional and FIFA 11+ training programs could reduce the risks of injuries in adolescent footballers, but FIFA 11+ had more effects on injury prevention, which could be explained by stabilization, muscle strength, and proprioceptive and postural alignment during the FIFA 11+ program, making it a better exercise to prevent injury.